


Bleed For Me

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Basically Dave being in love with his three best friends, F/F, F/M, M/M, Masochism, Multi, Sibling Incest (Unrequited), Unrequited Betacest, Unrequited Love, Xeno, awkward teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-02
Updated: 2013-01-02
Packaged: 2017-11-23 10:18:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/621033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That night he tells her that he wants her to carve her name into his chest and watch him bleed. She says she’ll do it for the glorious red. He tells her to do it to own him, but not in so many words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bleed For Me

When he sees her for the first time, it’s not love, or much of anything at first sight.  
He sees her, of course, but he’s too wrapped up in godhood to notice much beyond grey skin and a mouth full of daggers. It’s only when she shrieks at how red he is that he even knows it’s Terezi. He high-fives her and she tries to lick his face because she’s goofy and funny and that’s what bros do before looking around for Jade and John.

He doesn’t find them, of course, but he doesn’t quite realize that they’re not even on the meteor until Karkat tells him so. He walks around in a haze of disappointment until Aradia cheerily informs him that they’re burning the bodies so Gamzee won’t eat them.

He stands next to Terezi as Aradia lights up the first one, a big-horned guy bleeding shit, his head separated from his body. He looks permanently agonized, like he knows they’re burning him but can’t scream, and he’s a stupid-looking alien with metal legs that refuse to burn and with a gaping wound in his chest where his own weapon was shoved through his heart. The thought is agonizingly familiar, and he flinches. Next to him, Terezi balls her fist, looking far more somber than he ever would have thought her capable.

Sollux is the one who lights his own body, face bland, as Karkat sobs overdramatically into Gamzee’s shoulder. It’s all very strange, and if you’d told him he’d be watching an alien burn himself a week ago, he would have informed you that John was the only one allowed to say such unbelievably retarded things or have simply given you a monotone impersonation of a laugh. Terezi nudges him with her foot, the mood lighter now that the burning troll is clearly seen to be, not fine, but alive. “He’s always like that.”

Dave smirks and leans down to whisper. “Which one, the dick from Geek Squad or the weepy bitch?”

She laughs far too loudly for any event, never mind a funeral, but nobody stares, everyone lost in their own thoughts as she cackles on like the wicked witch of the west on happy gas. “ Very funny, Coolkid. Very, very funny.”

Kanaya finally shushes her as they haul out what’s left of the next body. Everyone glares at Gamzee as Karkat takes the torch and walks towards the headless corpse. He mutters something that sounds suspiciously like “I fucked up” and lowers the torch. Her hunting jacket goes up first, followed by the rest of her clothes and her tiny body until only metal claws remain. Glares remain on Gamzee as Aradia takes the torch again and a massive corpse, also headless, is telekinetically dragged to the center. She lights him up with a few whispered words and a forced smile and a pointed glare at Gamzee. Karkat’s nearing tears again, unsure whether to blame Gamzee or the dead for the corpse pile before finally deciding on himself.

The next corpse comes with a pair of butterfly wings slowly curling up as cerulean blood crusts on her orange clothes. Kanaya steps forward solemnly to take the torch, but before anyone can crack a joke about her carrying a torch for Vriska, Terezi’s marching up to Aradia and silently extending her hand. Kanaya nods. 

She takes the torch from Aradia and walks; slow and steady with strong footfalls, into the center and stands over the god she struck down. Her glasses are off and her eyes are red like his but not, the pupils and irises and whites all gone in a bloody flood of crimson. She stands before the body and says nothing, but looks down at the unmoving corpse with a heady mixture of anger and regret and forgiveness and loss and love and hurt that is all to bitterly familiar. The torches’ flame comes down in an arc to flicker down the veins of butterfly wings like lines of gasoline, and she walks back to where Dave is standing, with no trace of anything on her face. 

He sees her.

She can’t be taller than five foot four, and she’s made of razorblades with teeth like a shark that outnumber the amount that should be in any mouth. Her fingers, clutched around the torch as she hands it off to Kanaya, end in cracked yellow points. She could slit him open and eat him from the inside out and that does not terrify him as much as it should, with Rose observing at a distance and Jade and John alive but worlds away with a him that‘s not him. She looks at him like she knows what he’s thinking and her eyes are bloody suns, opaque and unseeing and they are so full of that feeling, the feeling of failing everyone you know and seeing the unbeatable beaten that he thinks that in that moment he knows her.

He doesn’t, of course, but she knows that and she knows him.

She stands next to him, and with her pack-a-day voice she whispers (or as much as she can whisper) “C’mon Coolkid, let’s go before we all drown in Karkat’s blubbering.” She walks. He follows with one last look at the group. Rose is standing next to Kanaya, who’s disdainfully burning two halves of a troll boy.

The first thing he does after they’re out of hearing range is ask Terezi about the dead troll girl with the butterfly wings and the long black hair. She glares at him like he’s just shat in the center of her make-believe courtroom and is now mushing the turds through her hair. “Dead.” She breathes and leans forward and kisses him.

It’s not so much a kiss as a vicious bite, and her lips are thin and chapped and forcing his open so her vicious teeth can sink into his lip and her tongue can slip past his defenses. She pulls away when he groans a name that probably wasn’t hers and grins.

~

He tells Rose about it the next day and he realizes Terezi reminds him of her in the way they bare both their teeth and their all-knowing minds when his mind is open and his metaphorical jugular is out. “Well?” He asks. “You’re a psycho psychic bitch, she’s a psycho psychic bitch, shouldn’t you have some kinda telepathic connection or whatever?”

She just smiles that little smile, black Cupid’s bow curving ever so slightly up in a way that he used to (still does) find incredibly hot. “Oh, I already know what this is about for her. I already know what it’s about for you.”

“Than why don’t you just fuckin’ tell me already. I’m hanging by a rope here and she’s the crazy vigilante who may or may not be about to kick the stand out from under my tiptoes.”

The bow arches “You don’t have to worry about your pretty little neck around anyone but Kanaya.”

“Okay, so you’re gonna keep being a tool who won’t share their seerly wisdom. That’s cool. Hanging your ecto-bro out to dry like granny’s old spotted panties after a bladder malfunction. That shit’s cool with me.”

“Just go along with it.”

“Huh?”

She’s goddamn infuriating so he walks away and she summons her knitting. He goes to find Terezi.

He asks her what the hell she thought she was doing and she told him she was having fun. He wants to push the question further but before he can say anything more she’s arching her brow in a way that makes him think of Rose and crushing their mouths together so hard he’s pretty sure he’s going to have a big bloody fat lip when and if she pulls away. She bites down, hard, and her tongue slithers in and he can’t do anything but groan his sister’s name into her mouth. She smiles like the Cheshire Cat and pulls away, her lips stained red with his blood and swollen teal with hers.

“What the ever-living fuck?”

She smiles up at him, her grin like the joker’s, a slit cut into her face. “I won’t do it again if you don’t want me to.”

He doesn’t want her to. (He doesn’t love her, doesn’t want her, doesn’t want to lay down and die for her a thousand times doesn’t want her name branded into his skin doesn’t want to make a world with her like he does with JohnRoseJade.) But her nails are sharp on his wrist and his lips are smarting and dripping crimson and maybe if he can’t repay them for not being the hero, not being his brother, she can make him pay.

He smiles at her with his dripping lips. “Fun’s cool with me.”(He doesn’t want fun from this and he gets the funny feeling fun is the last thing she wants as well.)

She goes back in for another kiss/bite and they groan names that aren’t each other’s into the bloody union.

~

He goes to talk to Rose the next day with vicious cuts on his lips, and she smiles that damn all-knowing smile as she looks up from her knitting. She’s flushed and there are two poorly concealed bite marks on her jawline and he wants nothing more than to take down the one who put them there with her own damn chainsaw. He has a feeling she knows all of this.

He asks her about Vriska and she looks a little green. “She was the dead troll Terezi burned. Why?”

“No reason.” (Terezi had cursed her name to hell and back into his mouth, and he had heard his name instead as she asked him, her. “Why couldn’t you just listen, you dumbass? Why’d you have to be such a goddamn selfish bitch?”)

He tries unsuccessfully to message John and Jade, and later finds himself standing in Terezi’s hive as she circles him like a shark around a bleeding whale. When they kiss his scabs split and he moans at the metallic taste. Her nails are like vices on his shoulders as she shoves him against the wall and he slides down and she groans into his neck “You stupid, stupid bitch.”

For someone so small she’s very strong and all’s he can think of is the taut muscles under Jade’s dark skin as she dropped her gun and pulled him close as he bleeds out and it hurt him, still hurts him inside because she didn’t need protecting, she didn’t need him and he had still managed to hurt her by hanging back and all he can do is breathe silent apologies as Terezi kisses his neck with violent intent. 

~

It’s Rose who approaches him the next day, a smudge of black on the neckline of her all-powerful pajamas and her mouth turned up with the power of newfound knowledge. 

“You asked about Vriska, correct?”

“Yep.”

She sits down on the makeshift bed in the corner of their shared room. (He’d watched her sleep, face relaxed as she whispered with the gods in tongues no mortal could comprehend and smiling until he recognized Kanaya’s name.)

“Ask Terezi about her.”

“I did.”

“Ask her again.”

And suddenly he’s mad, because she’s trying to help him, trying to wean him off of his reliance on her. She knows, and he knows she knows, but she won’t help him, because she’s trying to make him help himself. She’s right, of course, and that just makes him angrier.

“Kanaya, huh?”

She doesn’t react with the coy covering up he’d expected, just smiles up at him with apology in her eyes. She knows that too, knows how he watches her, knows what the little tugs at the corners of her lips do to his insides. She’d died with him, hand in hand, but he’d gripped tighter, and he’d moved forward as if to kiss her, tears streaming openly down his cheeks. She’d held him then, her thin little arms wrapped around his narrow waist, and he’d clung to her, apologizing for all he’d done to get them into this mess as the bomb went off. Of course she knows.

He goes back to Terezi’s hive, and passes Kanaya on the way out. He doesn’t glare at her, doesn’t feel any animosity, because he knows it’s not her fault. It’s his and their genetics and her sexuality and even if Kanaya had never emerged Rose would never had wanted him like he wanted her to, would never have taken ownership of him and brought him to his knees the way he knew she could. She nods as she passes him, and he enters the hive, where Terezi stands, folding up crude diagrams scrawled on paper in various shades of indigo. “What’re you planning?”

“Vengeance, obviously. The clown ran away before I could take him to court, and now I need to catch him. Fortunately, little miss green tea is more than willing to help me deliver justice.” She scowls at her sheets, a wicked smirk carved into her face. 

“Cool. You planning on burying him in true juggalo style? ‘Cause I hear that when a juggalo dies, in order for their spirit to be laid to rest, you’re morally obliged to sacrifice a virgin to the mirthful messiahs or whatever with a bowling pin and then have Faygo-fueled sex with the body while their sobbing best bro plays taps on bicycle horns and watches.”

She glares up at him with empty red eyes. “The Legislacerator shall bury the executed in whatever manner she sees fit, which will never involve Gamzee getting laid postmortem or Karkat being a whiny bitch.”

“Oh my god don’t start with the third person ‘I am the law’ shit you are a psychotic 13 year old alien with a justice fetish who thinks she’s daredevil.”

She rolls her eyes, or would have, if she had pupils. “Dave, Dave, stop with the blabber. You have a question. I can smell it.”

“Who was Vriska?”

“Ask John.”

Dave flinches. “I would if I could, but the messaging system is all screwy here. Plus, I get the funny feeling this is something I need to hear from you.”

She nods once, understanding but still not wanting to tell. Still, it’s only fair. She knows Dave far better than he knows her.

“Vriska was my F.L.A.R.P. partner. My partner in not-crime.” Dave motions for her to elaborate. “I’d pick a target, we’d kill it, and she’d feed it to her freaky spider lusus. But then she went to far; killing trolls not on the list, pushing Tavros off a cliff, killing Aradia, and just generally being a psycho. I exacted justice. She blinded me in return. I thought that was that, but she just kept getting stronger, madder, more power hungry. She killed Tavros. She almost killed all of us. I stopped her.”

It was lacking everything he really wanted to know, but Dave was pretty sure he could fill in the blanks. 

“Kiss me, Dave.”

Her voice hisses in his ears, telling him to stop thinking and just give in to her biting claws and razor teeth, but he refuses. “Why?”

She doesn’t look him in the eye. “Because.” She smiles and her voice is the kind of voice that makes him want to kneel to her and hand her his sword and let her decide whether he’s beheaded or knighted just like John’s. She shoves him against the wall and she is John who decides with a smile the course of Dave’s day, who had spurred Dave to destroy timelines and lifelines because John was a god before dying on that bed, the god who made Dave, both literally and metaphorically. He bends to her will, the way a knight should to the future king, and only later does he even think about what might be running through Terezi’s head.

He’s Vriska to her. Of course he’s Vriska, begging to suffer for all he’s done wrong, bloody but safe in the prison of her arms. He laughs at the absurdity of it all, because he is a stand-in in her crazy courtroom and he is enjoying every agonizing minute of it. He strolls back to his and Rose’s room with claw marks on his throat, and when she sees them she smiles the wistful smile of a mother who’s child is growing up, and the lack of resentment in her eyes hurts him in all the wrong ways.

~

He pulls her away from the hearing she’s writing and kisses her the next day, pressing his lips sloppily to hers before pulling back and baring his throat. She looks at him with a mixture of delight and questioning and he quickly elaborates. “Well, I’ve got one part to play and you’ve got three, so I figured it was time I started pulling my own weight around here.”

She smiles at that, and despite the teeth it doesn’t look freakish or intimidating, because he is seeing, finally seeing, albeit with help. “Is the prisoner asking for a longer sentence?”

“The prisoner simply wants to get what he deserves.”

And that is evidentially the perfect answer because she grabs his hair and yanks him down to his knees, and kisses at his throat. Everything’s different, because her teeth barely scrape his flesh, not a punishment but a warning, a flaunting of her capabilities, and her tongue flickers out to soothe the scrapes she makes immediately after. He’s not hurt, not paying, but coming under ownership and that is what he’s needed all along. He’s not ashamed of the names he cries, and she doesn’t seem to care. He is their most loyal knight, their servant, theirs, and now they are accepting that, realizing for the first time how much he needs them, and they are accepting him and keeping him and marking him as their own, and he is also a repentant thief in chains, throwing herself at the mercy of the court and accepting whatever he is given with pleasure. He finds he doesn’t mind the double role.

He takes a shower after that, and before stepping in he looks at his neck, covered in scratches for Bro’s death and doomed timelines and dying and not being good enough, coupled with hickies for stable time loops and the destruction of the green sun and scabs for the forgiveness and acceptance of the gods he worshiped. They stand out of his skin like stigmata, branding him. He thinks he likes brands.

Hot water hisses against his sensitive skin, and is smarts and stings and draws the blood up to tint his porcelain skin and he lies down, legs pressed vertically against the wall and touches himself to the thought of boiling water burning their names into his skin.

He leaves, weak-kneed, and Rose looks at him, stares with the same mixture of relief and sorrow that a doctor has when looking at a patient he just saved via amputation. He doesn’t look back.

~

When he walks to Terezi’s hive the next day there is already someone else visiting, and he can hear her rasping out legal jargon with steel in her voice and bitter determination on her tongue as she informs Kanaya that Gamzee Makara will pay. She sounds angry and vengeful and so very alive as she goes down the list of Gamzee’s crimes and it is glorious, superhuman. In her ice-cold wrath she is Themis the goddess, law above all mortal law, and Nemesis, the divine avenger, and he is barely just a man. He listens a while longer as she plots the Highblood’s downfall with her new partner in retribution. He does not enter, because he knows he cannot stand before that court while his failures go unpunished. He sits down before the door and listens.

~

It’s two days before he returns to Terezi’s hive, and when he enters, she’s put away her plans of vengeance and is scrawling on the walls in chalk. Gamzee’s drawn up there, with the words “H3 W1LL H4NG” carefully recorded above his head. He sits down next to her and asks if he can borrow the red. 

She glares at him with unseeing eyes, but her mouth is pulled up in that dangerous smile. “No.”

“Please.”

“No.”

“C’mon. I’ll even indulge your red fetish and let you taste the cherry apeshit apocalypse that is my cape.”

She looks up, intrigued. “Maaaaybe…”

He wiggles the cape in front of her like a matador and she strikes, dropping the red chalk on the ground as she reaches out and grabs his cape before he can pull away, tearing off a corner and popping it in her mouth as Dave looks on in horror.

“Wait what no, shit, do these things repair themselves? Fuck you this was so not part of the deal you weirdo. “

He drops the chalk and sticks his hand in the lion’s mouth, grappling for the shard of cape. She bites down on his finger, not hard enough to hurt but firm enough to hold in in place. “Geez, fine!” He yanks his hand away. “Keep it, slobber mouth. My cape probs heals itself anyway.” 

He wipes his hand off on his shirt as Terezi snickers and picks up the chalk. She pulls another red one from the box and starts scribbling an incredibly crude self-portrait. Dave squats next to her and scrawls out an ironically shitty one to match, and it’s not long before he’s snickering with her at the hideous image of Gamzee hanging she’s drawn. She licks the tip of the chalk and tries to draw a moustache on his face, and licks his hand as he shoves her away lightheartedly. As far as his time on the meteor has been, this is the most normal, drawing self-portraits in a ‘respiteblock’ with a troll girl whom he occasionally did god-knows-what with while pretending she was either his best bro, Bindi the Jungle Girl, or his sister and laughing like a maniac as she tries to lick his eyeball. 

When they finally sit down, he’s got a moustache and some weird squiggly bit of alien anatomy drawn on his face, and she has a unibrow and a penis to match. They don’t kiss. All logic and every romance movie on earth dictate that this is when people are supposed to kiss and not pretend that they are other people, but he doesn’t want to and she doesn’t want to so they don’t. Instead, she leans over; red chalk gripped in her yellow claws, and writes something in big, first-grade Alternian letters on his forehead. The chalk is slick with saliva but he doesn’t complain because he’s had her tongue down his throat before, and how is soggy chalk gross in comparison to that? “Is that ‘Dave is awesome’ in Alternian? ‘Cause otherwise I’m gonna have to wipe it off for slander.”

“It says ‘Property of Terezi’”

He doesn’t wipe it off on the walk back to his room. He doesn’t wipe it off when Rose looks at his forehead as though she can read it, and when he stands in front of the sink and wipes off the moustache and the alien dick, he doesn’t wipe it off. He doesn’t wipe it off until he’s in the shower and the red is dripping down into his eyes mixed with strawberry suds and making them burn. He has no idea why, but he supposes he rather likes the idea of belonging to someone.

~

He looks at her again the next day with new eyes, partially hoping that the night before means something’s changed, that they are suddenly in magical sappy inter-species love and he doesn’t have a thing for a straight guy, some weird feral chick, and his sister anymore. She doesn’t look any different to him, and his heart doesn’t leap up into his throat, and he still can’t imagine living for her and dying for her if she gave the command, because she did not give him the first bit of an identity that wasn’t his brother’s and she did not send him little texts filled with hearts when he needed it and she did not die there with him, hand in hand in the center of the end of everything. 

The only thing that makes him think of her and not someone else is her name, invisible but still burning on his skin as a mark of ownership.

He walks over to her and greets her with a fist bump and does not kiss her, and that night he lies down in the shower and writes names in the suds that collect in the dent between his ribcage and his hipbones and winds up panting and hard and confused.

~

He tries to message John before going to Terezi’s hive. The message doesn’t send, and nobody’s online.

~

 

He kisses her first, and she shoves him down on the chalk-covered floor and jams a bony knee between his legs and calls him Vriska, and he returns the favor wholeheartedly and something weird and squirmy presses against his leg and he doesn’t comment or care. She pants and shudders and grinds down and bites his shoulder a little too hard and he groans loud enough for anyone to hear and only when she’s made a strange little raspy noise and collapsed down on top of him does he wonder if that counted as sex. He hopes it does, because Bro was always bringing guys home and screwing them in the kitchen and making fun of him when he whined about the noise, claiming that he would only understand when he became a Real Man.

A small part of him really hopes it doesn’t because that small part of him cares about stupid stuff like feelings and he does not feel like much of a Real Man right now. Instead he feels sticky and cramped and sweaty and lonely and not at all how his passage into manhood ought to feel.

Terezi rolls off of him and there is a weird teal stain on her jeans and she grins somnolently up at him before slinging an arm over his chest. 

He falls asleep apologizing to people who don’t care and thinking that he rather likes the weight of her arm across his chest.

He dreams of brands.

~

She tells him the next day, with red smeared over her lips, that she’s not taking Gamzee to trial.

“Wait, so you’re just dropping the Ace Attorney shtick just like that?”

“Yep.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Why?”

“Miss green tea will take care of him.”

“And you wouldn’t?”

She looks at him with unseeing eyes like he is missing something that ought to be blatant.

“If I hang one murderer, I’ll have to hang all of them.”

She smiles at him sadly, and he does not reply. Instead, he helps her draw all over the hearing she had planned. She stops looking quite so pained and she kisses him amongst the remnants of her self-made justice and he still does not love her, but he wants her to know that he belongs to her and that as long as she owns him, he will always, always have a crime to pay for. She will never be unjust.

~

That night he tells her that he wants her to carve her name into his chest and watch him bleed. She says she’ll do it for the glorious red. He tells her to do it to own him, but not in so many words.

He lies down amongst shredded documents and slides out of his shirt in solemn silence as she kneels over him. She pulls her shirt off, mumbling something about equality and he stares at her small, pert breasts until she tells him to close his eyes. She touches the tip of one yellow nail to his right pectoral, and his breath hitches, because this is really happening, and it is not a burning brand but a freezing, jagged needle, and she is claiming him, taking responsibility for his failures, making him clean enough to love them without shame.

With a small sigh she pushes down lightly and drags her claw through the slopes of the Alternian T, and he arches up into the agony because he has nowhere else to go. It burns and drags and he bites down on his lower lip until it bleeds because there is no pleasure there. She lifts the claw and tells him he’s got five more letters to go, and he almost quits then, but she tells him to open his eyes and he is almost sick at the trails of red until she wipes them off one by one and raises her fingers to her mouth and tastes. She’s like a wild dog, graceless and salivating and primal in her bloodlust and all he wants is her name on his chest. 

He closes his eyes and feels the cold weight of her fingertip on his chest. He breathes in once, twice, before the pain begins.

When she finishes, he’s woozy from blood loss and her lips are stained metallic cherry. He asks her to prop him against the wall so he can see. He looks down at himself.

There are foreign letters swooping across his chest, oozing red and stinging viciously. He can’t read them, but he knows what they say, and so does she.

He slides back down into a full recline, and she lies down next to him with her head tucked under his arm, and it feels quite a bit more like how a first time should. He feels clean. Wanted. Owned. He looks back down at his chest and still cannot read the marks but he knows what they say and does not imagine they say anything else.

Terezi gives a little contented sigh next to him and he throws an arm around her. His heart does not leap. Butterflies do not form in his stomach. He still does not love her. But she is something, beyond something, and if this brand marks him as hers, he will never be nothing again.

**Author's Note:**

> Author’s notes: I honestly have no idea where this clusterfuck came from. It just kinda happened, with no outline or anything. That said, I actually rather like it. Not bad for a first Homestuck fanfic. Much thanks to JustPlaincarl for catching all of my many grammatical errors. And finally, much love to you for actually reading this thing.  
> Also, if anyone out there would like to beta for me I would love you forever.


End file.
